MRI scanner for wine to detect explosives at airports

Hold on to your bottled water: a machine originally designed to check the quality of wine could soon lift the current restrictions on taking liquids aboard aeroplanes.

In 2002 Matthew Augustine, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Davis, US patented a device to determine whether wine had spoiled without opening the bottle. It works in a similar way to the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners used in hospitals, combining a pulse of radio waves and a strong magnetic field to determine the chemical structure of the wine.

Augustine first turned his device to liquid explosives after a failed terror plot in 2006, which lead to a ban on taking large quantities of liquids on flights. He found that the technique could tell the difference between dangerous substances such as petrol and more innocuous liquids like toothpaste.

Now, the US Department of Homeland Security has funded Augustine's efforts, with the hope that the device could be tested at airports within a year. Such a machine needs to be small and easy to use, while also able to scan a wide range of containers. Augustine is currently experimenting with trade-offs between high-frequency radio waves that provide more detail, and low-frequencies that can pass through metal.